The Portable Atheist

Christopher Hitchens: Welcome to your gravy train.

The author of God Is Not Great seems to have won the battle for World’s Best Atheist (sorry, Richard Dawkins), and here has collected a far-reaching range of likeminded nonbelievers. There’s a heavy dose of old-school philosophy—included are logical postivists A.J. Ayer and Bertrand Russell—but thankfully Hitchens steers clear of “God is dead” progenitor Friedrich Nietzsche.

In fact, one of the most thought-provoking pieces in the book, by Elizabeth Anderson, takes that Nietzsche salvo and asks the relevant moral question, “If God Is Dead, Is Everything Permitted?” One of the more entertaining pieces (no surprise) is by H.L. Mencken, who begins his piece “Memorial Service” by asking, “Where is the graveyard of dead gods?” and runs through a list of deities—from Jupiter to Zagaga—who were once considered prime movers but are now nothing more than myths studied in comparative religion courses. Fiction writers take a crack, too, and Ian McEwan’s piece—a look at the apocalyptic daydreams of the faithful—may be the best of the collection.

Still, the rhetorical repetition gets, well, repetitive after a while, and let it never be said that the atheist can’t match the evangelist for over-the-top fervor. And the question remains: Is there really such a thing as a wavering atheist? It has to be the most self-evident ethos around. So why do we need 500 pages of reinforcement?